Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Ruins of the Dread Bishop

​A dungeon by Scott Malthouse, level 3
Written for Heartseeker
  I find myself wondering about the process here for coming up with an adventure’s name. Are we to contemplate a dread bishop’s own ruined remains, or are we instead being called to explore ruins once belonging to this dread bishop? Idle musings, really, but when a four-page product uses half its meager count to detail a mere seven locations outlined in yet another dreaded node map…well, the mind begins to wander. Heartseeker once more, because it was how my Google drive sorted my itch.io downloading spree. I wonder if this, with double the page count, will be a better representative adventure than last time?
  Basic setup is that the Dre…er, the Veiled Bishop, one Mr. [404 name not found], was once a very greedy fellow who was very bad and took too many tithes while being directly worshipped by his bishopric. If his people didn’t pay cash money he took the difference in souls and anyway now he’s dead but his soul is in a reliquary and it’s all very standard. Gorgeous piece of art being used for the cover image/node diagram background, I don’t recognize the work exactly, but it has a STRONG Hudson River School feel, wonderous and moody. It’s doing a lot of work.
  Now what I liked isn’t complex, but simple isn’t bad…there’s a move made to attempt a little bit of interaction, with a crazy bird lady wanting her favorite dagger/ogre’s pet goblin whole stole it/clear water where ogre threw the dagger also showing skeletons, that’s a solid triangle right there. I don’t hate the stab at puzzle-encounter design with undead crusaders in the main sanctuary standing on black squares in a checker pattern. Shyly hinted-at alternate means of vanquishing the bishop’s ghost, namely ringing the ancient church bell, is a cool idea with a decent complication of needing to rehang said bell…
  …but what can be improved is actually allowing any of those good ideas to be implemented. The bell thing? As written, you might have SEVEN undead whaling on the party while they take multiple rounds to do it (also note variable amounts of adds again, grump). That little drama with the dagger? The bird lady attacks by default, the ogre and goblin attack by default, and the skeletons rise to attack by default. There was potentially something decent here, but then you turned it into a boring hackfest. It almost doesn’t need to be said, but I need to say it…GIVE US A REAL MAP. I understand cartography is scary, but the adventure is set in a ruined church, there are millions of church schematics available, so many that even 2023’s Google could find them. Physical geography always improves an adventure.
  I’m going to regretfully say that the best use case for Ruins of the Dread Bishop is to look up what whoever that artist was for the inspiration artwork and adventure from that instead. The hackfest is okay but nothing new, the few flashes of good content aren’t anything so novel that you’d want to steal them. Maybe the undead-dispersing church bell? But I feel like I’ve seen that before…
  Final Rating? */***** not with hate or annoyance, just with mild disappointment. 

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